The upgrade to Parallels 3.0 appears to do some rearranging of the hard drive which corrupts a pointer used by ACT! 2007 (contact management software) on the Windows side. Upon restarting ACT! 2007, the database will no longer open and the error message is: "The database <database name> could not be accessed. In order to access this database, check your network connection and verify that your database server is available. It may be necessary to disable any firewall software on your computer or the server." The best solution to this problem is to backup the ACT database before doing the upgrade and then you can simply restore it after the upgrade. If you've not done that, you can delete the pointer file in the directory where your ACT database is stored. The pointer file ends in the extension .PAD and all it does is tell ACT where to locate the rest of the database. After deleting the .PAD file, start up ACT and click on Open Database and chose ".ADF" for the file type in the browse menu instead of ".PAD." Then you can directly open the file <database name>.ADF which has the actual database records. And ACT automatically creates a new file named <database name>.PAD so that next time you start up ACT it has the right pointer information and starts up just fine.
